Pima County wants to use an empty juvenile detention center to house Central American asylum seekers dropped off in Tucson by federal immigration agents.
Right now, asylum seekers are dropped off by the Border Patrol at a Greyhound bus station and they’re then driven to an empty monastery for shelter. That agreement ends in a few weeks.
Now the county wants to house them in a former juvenile detention center instead.
"There is a concern that the optics are that we’re putting people in a detention facility, which is not true. We’re putting people in a building that at one time was a detention facility," said Deputy County Administrator Jan Lesher.
The county intends to use a humanitarian aid section of a federal law enforcement grant, Operation Stonegarden, to recover its costs.
To talk more about this, The Show reached out to Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry.
